Sailing from Byzantium

by Colin Wells

  Florence itself certainly remained a vibrant center of Greek studies, as other Byzantine protégés of Bessarion succeeded Argyropoulos in the Florentine studio. But two other cities, first Rome and then Venice, would enjoy periods of primacy before the lead in Renaissance humanism moved outside the borders of Italy, finding new centers in northern Europe by the early fifteenth century.

  Rome, Bessarion, and the Humanist Pope

  In 1397, the year that Chrysoloras came to Florence, Tommaso Parentucelli, the son of a poor doctor, was born in the small Tuscan town of Sarzana, near Carrara. As a young man he was forced by poverty to abandon his studies at the University of Bologna. Making his way to Florence, he found work as a tutor for the children of two of Cosimo de Medici's aristocratic rivals. One was Palla Strozzi, the student of Salutati and Chrysoloras who had helped bring Chrysoloras to Florence. Parentucelli's other employer was Rinaldo degli Albizzi, head of the family that would engineer Cosimo's exile in 1433. Both were enthusiastic humanists, and through his job as tutor to their children Parentucelli gained entry into the Florentine humanist world.

  Returning to Bologna and completing his studies, Tommaso entered the service of Bologna's Cardinal Albergati, whom he served faithfully for two decades. He was with Albergati when the cardinal accompanied the papal curia on its Florentine exile. In Florence again, Tommaso took up his old humanist connections, joining the group around Bruni and Poggio as they gathered for conversation outside the Palazzo della Signoria in the mornings and evenings. He also formed a lasting friendship with Cosimo at this time, despite his earlier links with Cosimo's rivals. Assuming a leading role at the Council of Florence, Tommaso was made bishop of Bologna on Albergati's death and elevated to cardinal in 1446. A few months later, he was elected pope, taking the name Nicholas V.

  A diminutive, stoop-shouldered scholar, friendly and witty, Nicholas V was the first of several popes with a strong humanist outlook. Previous popes had used humanists for secretarial purposes; Nicholas was a humanist, and actively promoted a humanist agenda. His gentle, nonconfrontational style belied a determination to transform the Vatican into a progressive center of humanist learning and culture, which he believed was the best way to strengthen the role of the papacy in Europe's expanding civilization. An adroit diplomat, he placated the conciliarists with mild concessions, ending their insurrection against papal power once and for all. With Cosimo as his banker, he also adorned Rome with spectacular art and architecture. He relied on his friendships with the Florentines, many of whom had worked for his predecessors, but he went the earlier popes one better by placing ancient Greek, rather than Latin, at the center of his program. In the Vatican of this first humanist pope, as in Florence after Chrysoloras, we see the Italians using the tools the Byzantines had given them to create a vibrant new intellectual world.

  His great passion was books and book collecting, and it is as the founder of the Vatican Library that Nicholas V is best remembered. As the new library's crowning glory, Nicholas decided to commission Latin translations of Greek literature, including both classical and Christian texts. Quite possibly he envisioned translating all of the available Greek corpus. If so, he died long before that grandiose scheme could be accomplished, though he made a good start. To oversee the project he chose Cardinal Bessarion, giving him a blank check to attract the best Greek scholars, both Byzantine and Italian.

  In addition to hiring his fellow Byzantines, George of Trebizond and Theodore Gaza, and performing many translations himself, Bessarion lured a brilliant native Roman scholar named Lorenzo Valla back to Rome from the humanist court at Naples, where Valla had worked for over a decade. His first education had been in Rome, where he'd lived until his early twenties, till the jealous hostility of the Florentines who dominated the papal curia shut him out from employment there. One of the most gifted classicists of the Renaissance, and the most important figure among Bessarion's circle in Rome, Valla is thought by some scholars to have studied Greek with Guarino of Verona.

  Valla's treatment by the Florentines made him skeptical toward the papacy, and his skepticism is perfectly exemplified by his most celebrated achievement. While still at Naples (where the king was no friend of the pope), Valla had used his Latin expertise to demonstrate that the famous Donation of Constantine, a crucial document used to support the papacy's claims to temporal power since medieval times, was in fact a forgery. Then he came to Rome, where Nicholas V's unflinching support of such a papal critic as Valla shows the humanist pope's broad-mindedness, especially considering the charges of heresy that plagued Valla throughout his life— and beyond, since the church ultimately banned many of his works.

  Nicholas commissioned the landmark work that modern scholars find Valla's most impressive, the first complete translation into Latin of the Greek historian Thucydides. Later, in 1453, Nicholas commissioned Valla to translate the other great historian from the Greek classical period, Herodotus, though, owing partly to Thucydides’ far greater difficulty, the earlier translation is rated higher by posterity.∗

  With both translations but especially with the Thucydides, Valla made valuable textual emendations, proposing corrections in places where the manuscripts seemed corrupt. Many of Valla's emendations stand today, and modern textual critics would bust their bifocals to know exactly how much Bessarion helped with them. For his (presumed) deftness in proposing such corrections, Valla, who died in Rome a few years later at age fifty, is hailed as a major figure in the history of textual criticism, as well as a founder of the discipline of philology.

  His early friction with Poggio went on for the rest of Valla's short life, since the long-lived Poggio survived Valla by several years. The last of the old Florentine school, Poggio was in Rome when Valla arrived, and he remained there until 1453, when he returned to Florence to take up the chancellorship of his native city, which he held until his death at age seventy-nine. While still in Rome, Poggio had also quarreled several times with George of Trebizond, no stranger to controversy himself. But Poggio's squabbles with Lorenzo Valla and George of Trebizond, both of whom he continued to denounce after returning to Florence, reflect more than just standard humanistic crustiness. Like Poggio's departure from Rome, they betray his impatience with a new generation that put competence in Greek above all else. Poggio, once too young to study with Chrysoloras, was now too old to fit in with Bessarion.

  Times had changed, and knowledge of Greek was no longer merely a fashionable accessory, without which an unusually brilliant Latinist such as Poggio might survive and prosper. Instead, Greek now lay at the heart of the humanistic curriculum. This shift was part of what allowed the rise of a group like Marsilio Ficino's Platonic Academy, with its subtly nuanced interpretations of complex Greek philosophical texts. But nowhere was the change better illustrated than in the Rome of Pope Nicholas V, who initiated it, and his chief humanist, Cardinal Bessarion, who carried it out. That it took place in the bosom of the Latin church is but one ironic aspect of a situation that glints with irony from almost every angle.

  “Another Byzantium”

  Despite his long-standing connections with Rome, it was to Venice that Cardinal Bessarion chose to bequeath his own priceless personal library of some six hundred Greek manuscripts. The collection came second only to that of the Vatican Library, which Bessarion had helped Nicholas V create in Rome. Bessarion handed most of the books over in 1468, four years before he died, and they formed the nucleus of what became the Biblioteca Marciana, the Library of St. Mark.

  Like Theodore Metochites, who had made a similar bequest to the Chora nearly 150 years earlier, Bessarion knew well the value that posterity would place on these books. For Chrysoloras, teaching ancient Greek had come second to saving Byzantium, which still seemed a possibility. For Bessarion, after the Council of Florence, salvaging the Outside Wisdom was the best he realistically could hope for. He'd built his collection over many years, at times almost desperately, but resolved always that as many of the classics as he could la
y his hands on would survive the catastrophe of the Turkish conquest. Conscious and deliberate, his generosity was, with the rest of his life's work, part of a determined campaign to save ancient Greek literature by transplanting it to the West. There, he hoped, it might even promote a fusion of Greek East and Latin West that would re-create the cosmopolitan world of antiquity.

  If this alluring vision turned out to be overly optimistic, Bessarion still had good reason to choose Venice as the beneficiary of his largesse. The Fourth Crusade notwithstanding, Venice had always enjoyed a special relationship with Byzantium, although over the centuries the balance had shifted in Venice's favor as the Serene Republic progressed from Byzantine province and offshoot to Byzantine creditor and overlord. And of all Italian cities, Venice stood to lose the most by the Turkish advance. With its extensive commercial empire in former Byzantine lands throughout the Aegean, the city's economic and cultural ties to the Byzantine world remained pervasive and strong, if often rancorous.

  So although little love was lost between Venetians and Greeks, during the quarter century after the fall of Constantinople, Venice attracted more Byzantine refugees than any other Western city. By the last quarter of the quattrocento it held a Greek immigrant community of more than four thousand. Alterum Byzantium, “another Byzantium,” Bessarion called Venice in a letter to the doge explaining why he'd chosen to entrust his precious books to the city.

  At first hardheaded Venice had showed comparatively little interest in Byzantium's ancient Greek heritage, lacking the classical past of a Rome or a Florence and being more exclusively concerned with practical matters such as trade. Only in 1463 did the university at Padua establish a chair in Greek, its first occupant being one of Bessarion's Byzantine protégés, Demetrius Chalcondyles. He taught there for a decade before leaving to succeed John Argyropoulos in Florence. By the time Chalcondyles went to Florence, humanism had established itself strongly enough in Venice and Padua to justify Bessarion's choice.

  In both Venice and Florence, one of Chalcondyles’ students was a Venetian-born Greek named Nicolaus Leonicus Tomaeus, who eventually returned to Venice to teach Greek himself. His lucky students were among the first to benefit from a hugely significant advantage that no earlier generation anywhere had shared: printed texts in Greek. Invented in Germany by Johannes Gutenberg around 1450, the printing press had come to Italy by 1465. In the 1480s, a Roman humanist and printer named Aldus Manutius arrived in Venice. Aldus had studied Greek and Latin with Guarino of Verona, Chrysoloras’ closest student, and in 1495 Aldus’ Venetian publishing house, the Aldine Press, began printing its famous Greek first editions. Specializing in inexpensive, high-quality editions of the Greek and Latin classics, the prodigious Aldine Press soon turned Venice into the printing capital not just of Italy but of all Europe.

  Aldus’ highest priority was Greek, and to edit his Greek texts he chose another Byzantine student of Demetrius Chalcondyles’ named Marcus Musurus. A Cretan who has been called “the Renaissance's greatest Hellenist,” Musurus had come from Crete first to Rome and then to Padua, where he succeeded Chalcondyles in the chair of Greek. Now he took a leading role in the “New Academy” of mostly Byzantine scholars that Aldus formed to act as an informal editorial board, selecting which Greek works to publish, comparing manuscripts, and painstakingly preparing the texts.

  Though not the first Greek books printed in Venice (someone else had already published a popular edition of Chrysoloras’ Questions, for example), the Aldine editions brought Greek literature in the original language before a wide reading public in the West for the first time. Aldus’ Greek publications included Aristotle, Plato, Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Pausanias, and the ever-popular Plutarch. In addition, Aldus published numerous groundbreaking anthologies of Greek poetry and other works, helpful commentaries and reference books by Hellenistic and Byzantine writers, and a number of religious texts by the Greek Church Fathers. The Aldine Press issued some thirty Greek editions and some 130 editions in all before Aldus’ death in 1515.

  By that time, the combined efforts of the Byzantine and Italian humanists had achieved the goal that so many of them shared, of perpetuating ancient Greek literature. If the technological advance of printing allowed Greek texts to reach new audiences, equally important was the educational framework essential for comprehending those texts. The Byzantine humanists hadn't merely preserved the past, they had shown their Western students how to approach it and grasp it as well. Barely a century separates Barlaam's failed tutelage of Petrarch from the fall of Constantinople. The Italians’ eagerness to learn came in the nick of time—as, in a lucky conjunction, did the Byzantines’ to teach.

  Northern Europe had taken an interest now, too, and its scholars had begun journeying to Italy, where many of them studied with the same Byzantine teachers as the Italians. The Dutch scholar who was the greatest of the northern humanists, Desiderius Erasmus, learned Greek in Venice with Marcus Musurus. Erasmus’ English friend Thomas Linacre, a doctor and classicist who founded London's Royal College of Physicians, spent more than a decade in Italy studying Greek with Demetrius Chalcondyles and Politian, and winning his degree in medicine from the university of Padua. Linacre was Erasmus’ and Sir Thomas More's doctor, and the close friend of another English humanist, John Colet, who had also studied in Italy. The German humanist Johannes Reuchlin had come to Italy in the 1480s, where he studied Greek with John Argyropoulos in Rome.

  Another key figure was John Lascaris, a Byzantine who worked as Lorenzo de Medici's librarian, traveled widely in Ottoman lands to locate ancient Greek texts, and made his way to France, where he was appointed French ambassador to Venice in 1503. In Venice, he helped Aldus prepare an important edition of the Greek orators. John Lascaris is credited with bringing the Renaissance to France, where he befriended the early French humanists Guillaume Budé and Lefèvre d’Etaples, who had also studied with Argyropoulos in Rome in the 1480s. Even after 1453, Byzantine tides surged onto new shores in Western Europe.

  *The area remains an exciting place to visit, not least because the monasteries and churches of Mistra and nearby Monemvasia boast some of the finest surviving Paleologan artwork, rivaling that of the Chora.

  *A nephew of Constantine's, the emperor Julian (ruled 361–63) was the only pagan to rule the empire after Constantine. Known as Julian the Apostate, he tried to reinstate paganism, but was killed on campaign against Persia before his efforts could gain any traction.

  *The conciliarist movement originated in the church councils that were held to heal the schism between rival popes (1378–1418). Though the conciliarists had much in common with the Orthodox outlook, ultimately the Byzantines decided they were better off negotiating with the pope.

  *In Orthodox hierarchy, a metropolitan is the bishop of a city officially designated a “metropolis,” or mother city

  *The date of Valla's Herodotus translation, 1453, is ironic. Herodotus had chronicled the ancient Greeks’ finest hour: their odds-against victory over the Persians, the classical Greek world's equivalent of the Ottomans.

  Chapter Six

  A New Byzantium

  ear the end of the seventh century, the caliph Abd al-Malik decided to build a great monument to the Arab conquests of the previous half century, and to the new monotheistic faith of Islam that had powered those conquests. Abd al-Malik was the ninth caliph to rule after the prophet Muhammad, and the fifth in the Umayyad dynasty∗ He had just succeded to the caliphate, during a time of troubles in which numerous rebel Arab commanders had raised armies against the Umayyads. He was determined to restore Umayyad power, which was based not in Arabia but far to the north, in the Syrian city of Damascus.

  Dark-complected and stocky, Abd al-Malik was known to his subjects as “Dew of the Stone” for his legendary stinginess. This latter trait, however, would be in marked abeyance when it came to the project he had in mind now, a magnificent marble octagon crowned by a gleaming golden dome some sixty feet
across.

  As the site for his memorial, Abd al-Malik chose not Mecca or Medina, Islam's holiest cities, but the ancient city of Jerusalem, long holy to Jews and Christians, formerly the religious centerpiece of the Byzantine empire and one of the first objects of the Arab conquests. Known to the world as the Dome of the Rock, Abd al-Malik's monument is Islam's oldest surviving public building, and to many observers its most splendid. From the top of Mount Moriah, the Temple Mount so central to Jewish history, the Dome of the Rock still dominates the old city's skyline, its swollen, shining cupola lording it over the comparatively drab remains of Jewish and Christian sites. Below it lie two of those sites, the Western or Wailing Wall, which represents the last remains of the Second Temple, and a bit farther west the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, originally built by Constantine the Great, though destroyed and rebuilt many times since. Next to it is the smaller al-Aqsa Mosque, built by Abd al-Malik's son and successor al-Walid.

  Like Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, which the Gothic king Theoderic had finished about a century and a half earlier, the Dome of the Rock loudly and conspicuously proclaims the arrival of a new power to challenge the old. Also like Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, with which its lush interior decorative motifs have been compared, the Dome of the Rock asserts that arrival in the aesthetic idiom of the old power, which in both cases was Byzantium.

  The Dome of the Rock perfectly symbolizes Byzantium's influence on the emerging civilization of Islam. Based on Byzantine Christian building traditions—the structure copied the nearby Church of the Anastasis—Islam's first public monument was not imitated by later Muslim builders.

  It made no lasting impact on Islamic architecture, which went in other directions. In much the same way, Islamic civilization took the Byzantine imprint in its early stages, but ever since has seemingly struggled to erase all traces of it.